1. Field of Invention
This invention relates generally to the Internet and, more specifically, to a method and system whereby geographic-specific information (e.g., text, news, images, videos, etc.) can be rated by users in the geographic area and in surrounding areas for affecting ranked display of the information to others.
2. Description of Related Art
The Internet provides access to information world-wide in an instant and in many cases inundates the user with information. National or world news can be obtained on demand and someone selling or promoting goods or services can advertise to the world. However, the user in his/her own community may have no way of knowing “what's going on” in their local community. Certainly, national headlines and news are made available but as to what news and information would be interesting to local users and that would permit them, as well as others, to rate or rank such local news and information, there does not appear to be any available mechanism for accomplishing this.
Web sites such as www.digg.com and www.reddit.com permit users to rate articles but there does not appear to be any relationship of using proximity to geographic locations, and to use such ratings to influence users in these geographic locations to review and further rate them; nor does there appear to be appreciation for using the distances between the various user “raters” when creating the ranking of displayed articles.
See also http://del.icio.us which provides social bookmarking but appears to have the same deficiencies previously described.
The following U.S. patents and publications are examples of recommendation or location-related Internet systems and methods:
U.S. Pat. No. 5,930,474 (Dunworth) discloses a software interface that associates online information with geographic areas.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,460,036 (Herz) discloses a system and method for providing customized electronic newspapers and target advertisements. In particular, the system and method create a “target profile” for each target medium object and generates a user-customized rank ordering list of target objects most likely to be of interest to each user.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,792,573 (Duncombe) discloses a method for playing media, supplied by a user, based on feedback from the user.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,981,040 (Konig, et al.) discloses a method for personalized online information and product services by transparently monitoring user interactions during normal computer use, estimating parameters of a learning machine that defines a user model, analyzing documents based thereon and then estimating the probability that the user is interested in the document by using the model.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,985,588 (Glick, et al.) discloses a system & method for controlling access to digital information based on a location identity attribute; thus, such information can only be accessed by a user at the specific geographic location.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,071,842 (Brady, Jr.) discloses a location-based and preference-based system and method for matching the profiles of the attributes and/or characteristics of persons, places and/or things with the expressed preferences of mobile users, e.g., travelers, to alert and direct such users, via hand-held devices (e.g., cell phones, PDAs, etc.) to any places having attributes matching the user's express preferences.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,080,064 (Sundaresan) discloses self-correcting business rating system.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,013,238 (Weare) discloses a system & method for generating recommendations that automatically optimizes over time without human intervention. The invention utilizes a genetic algorithm that includes parameters that are adaptively updated.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,231,405 (Xia) discloses a method and apparatus of indexing web pages of a web site for geographical searching based on user location.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2005/0004948 (Navar, et al.) discloses a system and method for the facilitation of local community-based, person-to-person connections and transactions on national, international or global scale. The system/method uses local content such as postings of items available within a certain distance of the user's community.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2005/0080786 (Fish, et al.) discloses a system and method for customizing search results based on the searcher's actual geographic location when the search query was transmitted using a wireless device. Geographic location is extracted from the user's signals containing the search query. The search engine compares the searcher's actual geographic location against the geographic location information in the searchable resources for determining one or more parameters and then filters and ranks the search objects based on the determined parameters.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2005/0278309 (Evans, et al.) discloses a system and method for mining and searching localized business-marketing and information.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2006/0085392 (Wang; Lee, et al.) discloses a system and method for automatically analyzing Web searches for generating locality-selected results based on the user's location but also based on the business or other content provider's location and the degree of local intent in the user's query. Locale indicia (postal zip code, geographic area name, telephone number, etc.) are used.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2006/0200490 (Abbiss) discloses a system and method for geographical indexing whereby a user-selected location is obtained by providing a user with a graphical map and receiving a user-selected location on the graphical geographical map. Geographically indexed search results are obtained by indexing a plurality of search results which are then displayed to the user.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2006/0218146 (Bitan, et al.) discloses a system and method for an interactive user-controlled relevance ranking of retrieved information in an information search system.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2006/0271531 (O'Clair, et al.) discloses a system and method for scoring local search results based on location prominence.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2007/0005419 (Horvitz, et al) discloses a method whereby collaborative filtering is combined with location logs and location updates in order to recommend location or services information to a user that arrives at a location.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2007/00156435 (Greening, et al.) discloses a system and method for finding location-associated items.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2007/0047568 (Wang, et al.) discloses a system and method for providing locally-applicable Internet content with secure action requests and item condition alerts. The invention uses a cache with Internet content that is determined to be locally-applicable based on monitoring the Internet content accessed by users from particular locations.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2007/0061301 (Ramer, et al.) discloses a system and method for user characteristic-influenced search results. In particular, information relating to user characteristics associated with a mobile communication facility (e.g., a cell phone) and other capabilities are used to improve the presentation and relevance of mobile content to appropriate or desirable mobile communication facilities.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2007/0061302 (Ramer, et al.) discloses a system and method for location-influenced search results. In particular, information relating to the location of the mobile communication facilities (e.g., a cell phone) and other capabilities are used to improve the presentation and relevance of mobile content to appropriate or desirable mobile communication facilities.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2007/0100955 (Bodner) discloses a system and method for using known geographic locations of Internet users to present content web pages.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2007/0118520 (Bliss, et al.) discloses a method for receiving on a mobile device a search query associated with a geographic location and then presenting search results associated with a geographic location in a graphical display.
International Publication WO 00/52934 (Gofman, et al.) discloses a system and method for serving local and global media content at a local site according to at least one locally-determined characteristic of the audience to which the combined content is provided.
The following are non-patent publication literature pertaining to recommendation systems which basically use information about the user to provide suggestions to the user:    Joshua Alspector, Aleksander Kolcz, and Nachimuthu Karunanithi. Comparing feature-based and clique-based user models for movie selection. In Proc. of Digital Libraries 1998, 1998.    Marko Balabanović. An adaptive web page recommendation service. In Proc. of the 1st International Conference on Autonomous Agents, February 1997.    John Breese, David Heckerman, and Carl Kadie. Empirical analysis of predictive algorithms for collaborative filtering. Technical Report MSR-TR-98-12, Microsoft Research, 1998.    Dhiraj Goel and Dhruv Batra. Predicting user preference for movies using netflix database. Student class project report.    Jennifer Golbeck. Computing and Applying Trust in Web-Based Social Networks. PhD thesis. University of Maryland, College Park, 2005.    Jennifer Golbeck. Generating predictive movie recommendations from trust in social networks. In Proc. of the 4th International Conference on Trust Management (iTrust), 2006.    Jennifer Golbeck. Personalizing applications through integration of inferred trust values in semantic web-based social networks. In Proc. of the Semantic Network Analysis Workshop, 2005.    Ken Goldberg, Theresa Roeder, Dhruv Gupta and Chris Perkins. Eigentaste: A constant time collaborative filtering algorithm. Information Retrieval, 4:133-151, 2001.    Joseph Konstan, Bradley Miller, David Maltz, Jonathan Herlocker, Lee Gordon and John Riedl. Grouplens: Applying collaborative filtering to usenet news. Communications of the ACM, 40(3), March 1997.    H. J. Lee and Sung Joo Park. Moners: A news recommender for the mobile web. Expert Systems with Applications, 32:143-150, 2007.    G. Linden, B. Smith, and J. York. Amazon.com recommendations: Item-to-item collaborative filtering. IEEE Internet Computing, 7(1):76-80, January/February 2003.    Stephen Marsh. Formalising Trust as a Computational Concept. PhD thesis, University of Stirling, 1994.    Andreas Mild and Thomas Reutterer. An improved collaborative filtering approach for predicting cross-category purchases based on binary market data. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services Special Issue on Model Building in Retailing and Consumer Service, October 2002.    Steffen Schilke, Udo Bleimann, Steven Furnell, and Andrew Phippen. Multi-dimensional personalization for location and interest-based recommendation. Internet Research, 14(5):379-385, 2004.    M. van Setten. Personalised information systems. Technical Report TI/RS/2001/036, Telematica Institut, June 2001.
The following are non-patent publication literature pertaining to news recommendation systems:    Liliana Ardissono, Luca Console, and Ilaria Torre. An adaptive system for the personalized access to news. AI Communications, 14(3):129-147, 2001.    Orkut Buyukkokten, Junghoo Cho, Hector Garcia-Molina, Luis Gravano, and Narayanan Shivakumar. Exploiting geographical location information of web pages. In WebDB (Informal Proceedings), pages 91-96, 1999.    Abhinandan Das, Mayur Datar, and Ashutosh Garg. Google news personalization: Scalable online collaborative filtering. In Proc. of WWW 2007, 2007.    Junyan Ding, Luis Gravano, and Narayanan Shivakumar. Computing geographical scopes of web resources. In Proc. of the 26th VLDB Conference, 2000.    Joseph Konstan, Bradley Miller, David Maltz, Jonathan Herlocker, Lee Gordon, and John Riedl. Grouplens: Applying collaborative filtering to use net news. Communications of the ACM, 40(3), March 1997.    Joseph A. Konstan. Introduction to recommender systems: Algorithms and evaluation. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst., 22(1):1-4, 2004.    Raymond Mooney. Content-based book recommending using learning for text categorization. In Proc. of the 5th ACM Conference on Digital Libraries, June 2002.    Shopping.com, Inc. Epinions.com. http://www.epinions.com.    Andrew Trotman, Timothy Jones, and Chris Handley. Recommending geocaches. In Proc. of the 10th Australasian Document Computing Symposium, December 2005.
The following are non-patent publication literature pertaining to location awareness systems which take into account user location or environment:    Mauro Brunato and Roberto Battiti. PILGRIM: A location broker and mobility-aware recommendation system. In Proc. of the First IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, 2003.    Mauro Brunato, Roberto Battiti, Alessandro Villani, and Andrea Delai. A location-dependent recommender system for the web. Technical Report DIT-02-0095, Universitádi Trento, Nov. 2002.    Wesley Chan. Dealfinder: A collaborative, location-aware mobile shopping application.    Andrew Fano. Shopper's eye: Using location-based filtering for a shopping agent in the physical world. In Proc. of the Second International Conference on Autonomous Agent, pages 46-421, May 1998.    Google, Inc. Google local. http://local.google.com.    Groundspeak, Inc. Geocaching—the official global gps cache hunt site. http://www.geocaching.com.    T. Gross and M. Specht. Awareness in context-aware information systems. In Proc. Mensch Computer 2001, 2001.    Tzvetan Horozov, Nitya Narasimhan, and Venu Vasudevan. Using location for personalized poi recommendations in mobile environments. In SAINT '06: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Applications on Internet, pages 124-129, Washington, D.C., USA, 2006. IEEE Computer Society.    Kevin Keenoy and Mark Levene. Personalisation of web search. Intelligent Techniques for Web Personalization, pages 201-228, 2005.    Mehran Nadjarbashi-Noghani, Jie Zhang, Hossein Sadat K. M., and Ali Ghorbani. PENS: A personalized electronic news source. In Proc. of the 3rd Annual Communication Networks and Services Conference, 2005.    Reinhard Oppermann and Marcus Specht. A context-sensitive nomadic exhibition guide. In HUC, pages 127-142, 2000.    Topix, LLC. Topix, 2007. http://www.topix.net.    Chin-ShungYang, Szu-Pyng Kao, Fen-Bin Lee, and Pen-Shan Hung. Twelve different interpolation methods: A case study of surfer 8.0 In Proc. of the XXth ISPRS Congress, Geo-Imagery Bridging Continents, July 2004.    Yelp. Yelp.com. http:/www.yelp.com.
Thus, there remains a need for a providing a system or method for permitting geographically-pertinent information provided on the Internet to be ranked by users, while taking into account the users' geographic proximity to the information, the distance between each user who rates the information, the age of the information, and the age of the users' ratings to determine a ranking of such information.
All references cited herein are incorporated herein by reference in their entireties.